Amarok Blog

Entries from April 2010

Tuesday, April 20. 2010

Finally! The first Gluon alpha ... Posted by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen in leinir at 15:23

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Finally! The first Gluon alpha released! :D

Finally, after long months of a whole lot of hard work, the Gluon team is now very proud to announce the immediate release and availability of the Gluon software packages - The Gluon libraries, Gluon Creator and a couple of little samples. So... Come one come all! Announcement over on the Dot. Sacha (DrIDK) has furthermore recorded a little screencast (yes, i know, it's on youtube, but hey, if you care enough about that, you are obviously using a html5 compliant browser and thus you should be able to view the video anyway

). Watch out, though, the sound is a little funny, thanks to GtkRecordMyDesktop being weird

Thanks to Eugene (it-s) for the amazing graphic above, which is used on the GamingFreedom.org website.

For those who don't want to worry about the reasonings behind Gluon and such, you can go straight to the download page and grab yourself a copy, and start playing around

Sunday, April 11. 2010

Startup Weekend, survey Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen in freespirit at 14:18

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Startup Weekend, survey

I am currently at an event called Startup Weekend in Copenhagen. The event aims to get as many talented people and people with good ideas as possible together and the see what they can come up with over a weekend.

I joined a team working on an idea that could potentially revolutionize the way you think about your social media ( Bold words, I know

). The basic idea is to form a graphical and searchable timeline of your activities on various social media sites.

As part of our idea, we need feedback from people comfortable with using multiple different social media, a description that fits much of the Amarok and KDE community. If the idea sounds interesting, you can help us out by taking our 2 minute survey (where there is also a more detailed description of the idea)

Thanks!

Monday, April 5. 2010

Something for Amarok 2.3.1+ Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen in freespirit at 19:32

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Something for Amarok 2.3.1+

It has been brought to my attention that recently, I have not blogging enough about cool new features in future versions (as in, not the upcoming version, but a later one) of Amarok.

So to make some kind of amends, here is a little something I hacked together yesterday. It needs a lot of polish still, but it does work (mostly).

Yes, that is the beginning of full .cue file support for Amaroks local collection

Saturday, April 3. 2010

Rapid Progress in KDE Multimedia Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 11:42

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Rapid Progress in KDE Multimedia

Lately we have made some really nice progress on the Multimedia front, and I thought it would be nice to keep our users (and other developers) a bit up-to-date with all the latest buzz. First of all, I'm happy to announce that we have finally been able to make Phonon-VLC usable and stable. Mostly we have to thank Ben Cooksley for that, who invested many hours in doing some rather complicated detective work for making this work nicely. But now we are there, and most features are working, minus some things like Equalizer support (but we'll get there too).

Let me sum up why exactly this new Phonon backend is so important to us:

Phonon-VLC is fully cross-platform, so we don't need special backends for Windows and Mac any more

It's already far more stable than most other existing Phonon backends

We can now focus on creating one good backend, instead of having 10 more or less broken ones

It simply sounds awesome. I'm not sure why that is, but the sound quality is notably better than with xine

It is currently a bit complicated to build this backend, as it needs libVLC 1.1, which is not yet packaged by most distros. However, we plan to write a tutorial for building it, and we're also happy to help out with questions in the #phonon IRC channel. Give it a try

In other news, Amarok is making rapid progress. Only a few weeks ago we have released Amarok 2.3.0, but thanks to our extremely short release cycle (I had earlier written about this system in this article), our current ChangeLog for 2.3.1 is already rather promising. Not only will 2.3.1 come with many bug fixes and some polishing, but we'll even introduce a number of exciting new features. I'd like to give you a preview of two new features here: